Staff ride!

What interesting days I’ve just spent with the SAIS strategic studies students on their staff ride to study the Shenandoah campaign of 1862!

These were among Stonewall Jackson’s best weeks, when he repeatedly defeated numerically superior Union forces in a valley that appeared to lead directly to Washington DC.  Jackson’s concentration of forces in space beat the Union effort to concentrate its forces in time.  Achieved against inept Union generals, Jackson’s success drew thousands of soldiers away from the Union effort to lay siege to Richmond, distracted President Lincoln and boosted Confederate morale. This side show had important, though far from decisive, effects.

I won’t try to run down the eleven sites we visited during the two days, with presentations at each one by participants giving the perspective of one or another contemporary observer on the events of that particular place. Roles included not only generals but also aides, spies and citizens as well as presidents Lincoln and Davis.  All orchestrated by an extraordinary team of students with military precision.

Just to offer one illustration:  I played the role of Richard Garnett, a West Point graduate and Conferederate general who displeased Jackson by withdrawing the “Stonewall” brigade (ironically from a stone wall) during the first major battle of the campaign on March 23, 1862 near Kernstown, Virginia.  Garnett, whose men were out of ammunition and faced defeat at the hands of a superior Union force, thought he had saved the brigade from unnecessary slaughter that would have discouraged reenlistments and weakened the confederacy.   Jackson didn’t agree and charged him with neglect of duty, but his court martial was never concluded.  Garnett was killed leading his men into Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.

The “strat” students are mainly focused on military operations, which are more interesting when recounted on the spot by people who have done a lot of research than they are in the often dry and difficult to follow narrative accounts in Civil War tomes.  I came away with a finer appreciation for the mil ops side of things, but also with a lot of questions about its interaction with the civilian world.

Those questions start with the political objectives of the war and the effort to keep clarity and unity of purpose.  There were problems on both sides in 1862.  Lincoln initially made preserving the Union his political objective, but in fact he was contemplating a shift, which he made in January 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in rebel states.  During 1862, he still needed to try to keep on board for the Union cause both radical anti-slavery Republicans and Democrats like General McClellan, who wanted to compromise with the “peculiar instituiton.”  He did this partly by appointing politicians as army officers.  Their military ineptness and political competitiveness accounted for much of the poor performance of the Union in the 1862 valley campaign.

The Confederate war objective was recognition as an independent country.  For this it was vital to prevent a seige of Richmond, which it is arguable Stonewall Jackson helped do.  But Jackson’s squirreling up and down the valley killing lots of Union troops and many of his own did little to assist the Confederacy’s diplomacy.  England, which had an economic interest in the South’s cotton (as well as good reason to fear competition from the industrializing North), was increasingly anti-slavery in popular sentiment.  No one was likely to recognize the Confederacy until it could prove its mettle in a major engagement north of the Mason-Dixon line.  Jackson’s antics were nowhere near sufficient to meet the political requirements.

The Union errors were compounded, ironically, by rapid communications, which gave Lincoln the sense he could manage the war from the White House.  He had no in-theater commander during the 1862 valley campaign but tried to coordinate Union forces either on his own or through Secretary of War Stanton.  The orders were often muddled, late, ignored or misinterpreted.  Intelligence was also a problem.  The population of the Shenandoah valley was mostly rebel sympathizing.  Stonewall Jackson often had better, more timely intelligence (and maps) than the bumbling Union commanders.

Local citizens suffered a good deal from the fighting, but in this early stage of the war they were more collateral damage than target.  Hospitals would sometimes serve the wounded of both sides.  Prisoners were often released.  Looting and pillaging were associated with particular units.  Things would get a lot worse for civilians over the next three years.

We don’t usually think of the American Civil War as an identity conflict.  But in a way it was.  Many of the Confederate officers had not been in favor of secession, or even slavery, but their first loyalty was to Virginia or some other state, not the Union. Many of the Union officers cared little for abolition, but were loyal to the United States.  Forced to choose, they chose.

This identity dimension of the conflict raises serious questions about the war and its aftermath.  Would it have been possible to negotiate an earlier end to the war?  What would that have meant for slavery?  Even with the complete defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, the South managed after Reconstruction to institute segregation and economic practices that subjugated and impoverished former slaves.  Our current commitment to equality really dates from 100 years after the Civil War and is still not fully effective.  We disagree on how it should be implemented, from voting rights to college admissions.  Are we still haunted by identity issues?  Are the fights over getting to Washington DC, now conducted at polling places rather than in the Shenandoah valley, still more about identity than about the issues we debate?